(listen to episode on spotify)
(music: main Chrononauts theme)
introductions, recent non-podcast reads, general discussion of the concept of "the family"
Nate:
Good evening and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Nate and I'm joined by my co-host Gretchen and J.M., how are you guys doing tonight?
Gretchen:
I'm doing good. It's a little, a little hot out, but not as hot as it has been, so.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely hot here up in the attic.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
My least favorite time a year to record these, but we'll get through it.
JM:
We had a little bit of a hit wave, but it's not so bad now. Today was a little bit hot, but I don't know. It's been all right the last week or two after a sudden spike. I'm sure it'll get worse. But yeah, it's not so bad up here in Southern Ontario. So I'm happy about that. Other things have been a little hectic and weird, but hoping all right. I've really been looking forward to doing this episode.
Gretchen:
Yes.
Nate:
Yeah. I think it'll be a lot of fun. But before we get into that, you can find us on all of the major podcast platforms. So Apple, Spotify and all that. We also post our episodes on YouTube and we maintain a blogspot at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com where you can find original translations primarily from Russian and Spanish language short stories. You can also follow us on Twitter @chrononautsSF or facebook.com/chrononautspodcast.
JM:
And if you do like our podcasts or if you just have something to say, we do encourage you to leave a comment wherever you feel it's right to do that. And let us know and keep the algorithms or whatever they are recommending us.
Nate:
Or if it's too long for a comment, feel free to send us an email at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com.
So I guess before we get into the actual stories and theme we're doing tonight, which is going to be the family and fertility. We haven't talked about what we've been reading outside the podcast lately. So why don't we do that for a couple of minutes before we get into our first story?
JM:
That sounds good. I've actually been reading quite a lot of other stuff recently. Where do I even start? Well, I just finished "Ubik" by Philip K. Dick. First time I read that one. And yeah, it's one of his legendary books. It was very weird. I liked it. I sometimes, I don't know. PKD is a really bizarre writer to me. Sometimes his stuff seems to definitely dwell within those pulp conventions, but there's a certain amount of weird thinking and bizarre stylistic choices that does set him apart.
Occasionally, I do get a little cynical about the cult of PKD. I just kind of feel like, oh yeah, you know, the just big cult around PKD to develop, especially in the California area. That's why we have so many movies based on his work and stuff like that. And maybe he's been venerated over other authors a little bit unfairly in terms of somebody who thinks outside the box. I'm not saying he doesn't do that. I'm just saying that others do that to it. They don't get noticed. And I just feel kind of like, maybe there's a little, a little bit of a cult around him.
Nate:
But yeah, that's the nature of things, I suppose. I certainly really enjoy his work. While I haven't read that one, I've read three of his other novels and a couple of his short stories. And we're probably going to be covering him on the podcast quite shortly. So I'm definitely looking forward to doing that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I myself have only read "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" and a couple of short stories myself. So I would be interested in reading some more from him. Yeah.
JM:
And I know I don't definitely don't want to put him down because I really do appreciate what I've read. And "Ubik" was quite a ride. It's kind of one of those things where I'm not really sure that even he has all the answers. There's this big exposition in the last 20 pages that kind of tries to explain everything that just happened. And it maybe leaves me with more questions than it actually answers. But I don't know, I enjoyed the ride. It was weirdly funny in spots. And yeah, it was good.
I also read "White as Snow" by Tanith Lee, which was a retelling of sorts of the Snow White story. But it's extremely, I don't know how to put it, very gothic, kind of feminist, very, very sexual. It was good. It was really quite beautiful in parts, quite blasphemous, very, very pagan. I liked it a lot. It's definitely very different from the last Tanith Lee book I read, which was sort of more lighthearted science fiction. But it's really good.
The last one I wanted to mention specifically because I wasn't expecting this, but it kind of ties in with the theme of our episode. This was "The Elementary Particles" by Michel Houellebecq. This is a fairly recent book, early 2000s, written by a quite controversial French author. Yeah, it was a weird story about these two half-brothers who are born into, I guess, like, post-Hippie generation and stuff and all the weird things that they experience with their cultish family members and stuff like that. A lot of sexual perversity and stuff. The one brother doesn't care for such things at all, is in fact no interest in sex. But the other one is completely consumed with it, and it basically drives him insane. The one brother is actually a geneticist. He's a scientist, and he's been studying DNA. Well, the science fiction underpinning only comes into play really at the end. But it's set in the near future, and you kind of get this feeling that some big change is coming and the story is leading up to that. And in fact, it does. The scientist brother has come up with a way to create a new human race where there is no differentiation between the sexes. And he thinks that this would solve a lot of humanity's problems. And it's a little bit of a satire. It's, I feel like the author is kind of disingenuous, like, is having us on a little bit. But I had sort of enjoyed that ride, too. But it was kind of this thing where I'm a little bit, I'm not quite sure exactly what he was trying to say. And how much of it was a big joke, honestly. So, I don't know. Interesting read, though.
And I'll mention it again later, because while I was reading "Children of Men", I actually got the two books confused for, like, a brief second. I forgot which one I was reading.
Nate:
Nice.
Gretchen:
As can happen when you're reading more than one book at a time.
JM:
Yeah, it was really, the thing that charred me out of it was really funny, too, because he started talking about, like, "Emmanuelle" or some European porn movie or something like that. And I was like, wait a minute, this doesn't sound like PD James. A couple of other, like, shorter things, but that's, I guess, the main, the main stuff that I've been reading lately. What about you guys?
Gretchen:
Yeah, I have been able to read a little bit more than I have recently than when I was in school, which was very nice. It was nice to read things that I wanted to read for a little bit instead of things that were assigned.
Nate:
No test at the end, either.
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah, I don't have to write any essays on them, like, just to enjoy them. But I read "Exquisite Corpse" by Poppy Z. Brite, which was really, really interesting read, but definitely not one I can recommend to most people in my life. I don't think they would appreciate it as much as I did. It's a really well-written book, though, and I really would like to read more of Bright's work.
And in a similar vein, I read this other book called "Tell Me I'm Worthless" by Allison Rumfitt, which I think only came out, like, a few years ago, which is this really interesting, like, haunted house novel that also examines, like, transphobia and the rise of fascism in Britain. It's a really interesting work as well. And I read those two as, like, bookends to "Children of Men", so it felt... I went through a very bleak reading period at that time.
I also ended up reading this one book, "Not One Day", which is by a woman named Anne Garréta, who is in the movement called Oulipo. It's a French movement where writers impose their own sorts of restrictions on their writing and try to find creative ways around it. It's one of the big ones that people know about is "A Void", which is a book written without the letter E used at all. And that's, like, it's in a similar vein where they try to impose certain rules they have to follow throughout the work. Yeah, I really liked it. I read something by her in a class a few years ago and thought I'd give another one of her works a shot.
JM:
It's a really interesting idea. A part of me wants to say, oh, it's gimmicky, but then, like, I kind of think to myself, people do say that creativity thrives under limitations sometimes, and sometimes when you have to force yourself to work within certain limitations, the challenge can actually be really good for creativity. So it is kind of interesting to think about what things you could actually do, because something like not having a letter is just one example of the different challenges you could create for yourself with such a movement. And if different people are all kind of rising to similar challenges, then it can also create a hopefully healthy, competitive kind of atmosphere almost. That's pretty cool.
Nate:
Cool, yeah. So in terms of, I've been reading recently, I finished up "Little Dorrit" by Charles Dickens, which is not my favorite Dickens, not my least favorite, it's kind of somewhere in the middle. I didn't really like the ending, but Dickens' style in general, I really, really like, and there's a lot of fun characters in this. But I don't know, it didn't break my upper tier of Dickens really.
Then I read "Invisible Man" by Ralph Ellison, and I really, really liked that one.
JM:
Oh, that was an amazing book.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I love that book. I've read it twice for classes, and I enjoyed it both times.
Nate:
Yeah, I primarily listened to it on audiobook, and the narrator was really good, but the version I had like cut out 30 minutes before the end. So I was like, kind of annoyed.
JM:
That sucks.
Nate:
Right at the climax of the riot.
JM:
Yeah. You have to read the epilogue that Ellison wrote, because that's really, I think that's really important. To modern readers, specifically.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
Even though he wrote it in 1947, the epilogue could have been written today, which was really startling to me.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and some of the other introductory stuff he talks about other genre fiction and his quest to get it published to begin with, which I thought was pretty cool that all that stuff was included. So yeah, definitely, definitely really great novel, very highly recommended.
I am almost finished up with William Faulkner's "The Unvanquished", which is my first time reading that one. It's definitely really good. It's probably on the lower end of his difficulty scale. I know some people can get intimidated by his prose style, but this one really isn't too difficult. It's a whole bunch of little sketches that all revolve around the same time period in the Civil War, so it doesn't span like 50 years or something like that, like some of his other works do. It's pretty good short little read. It should be finished sometime this week.
And I've also started in about two thirds the way through James Joyce's "Finnegan's Wake", which has definitely been quite the experience so far. It definitely lives up to its reputation as far as the difficulty and bewilderment goes, but it's also really, really incredibly funny, which is the one thing that a lot of people don't talk about when they mention Joyce is he's just very good at putting together these ridiculous sentences that are very, very fun to read. It's not everybody's kind of humor. I think it's very similar to like Frank Zappa in that like he has his own style of corny humor and a lot of people that even that like similar styles of music like Genesis or ELP or Rush or whatever might not get along with Frank Zappa too well just because his humor is very much in the forefront. And if you don't really like the style you're probably not going to get on with him that well, same with James Joyce. But yeah, there's definitely a lot there for sure. It makes you think about things in a totally different way. I mean, it's ridiculous on in a lot of ways, but it's kind of about mankind's, I guess, fall and resurrection but filtered through the Irish ballad of Finnigan's Wake but also how it fractalizes and repeats itself throughout history so it also brings up Humpty Dumpty a lot, and Tristan and Iseult and a lot of these metaphors and character archetypes blend together in the multi lingual puns and dream logic and yeah it's just really difficult to follow at times but I think overall very, very entertaining.
JM:
Yeah, it sounds like a difficult thing to crack, but really worth it. And definitely people commented on "Ulysses" being a humorous work at times too. So I'm not really surprised that it's funny, but it does seem sometimes like when a book is difficult, people have trouble, difficult in quotes, people have trouble recognizing the humor aspect and highlighting that like they almost subconsciously think those two things don't go together, which is kind of silly, but they're working too hard to laugh or something. I don't know.
Nate:
The difficulty level is extremely high. I'm reading two reference books along with it, "The Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake", which was written by Joseph Campbell and it definitely provides you like framework to latch on to or else the first read of the book would just appear like total nonsense and gibberish. It really does give you kind of a framework to latch on to. And then there's also the "Annotations to Finnegan's Wake", which basically detail all of the individual references of politicians and battles and multilingual puns and things like that, though. It's certainly not complete by any means. It lists abbreviation for all the languages that appear in the novel and it's something like 65 to 75 or so languages, but one of them isn't Catalan, so it makes me wonder if the compilers of the annotations mistook a Catalan phrase for Italian or French or Spanish or something like that because they note that Basque is in there in pretty much every other European languages and it seems like Joyce would certainly be familiar with the Catalan struggles given that he wrote the novel in Paris and a lot of refugees and exiles from the Spanish Civil War were fleeing to Paris during that time. So yeah, there's a lot, a lot, a lot there. It's extremely dense work, but if you read "Ulysses" especially and enjoy his style, I think you'll get a lot out of it. It's certainly the kind of book that one would read and reread and reread over and over again just because you'll pull something different out of it every time. It's definitely not the kind of work to be taken all in at once, but maybe each chapter individually here and there.
And there's a really good audiobook production that is currently in process done by an art collective out of Tulsa, Oklahoma, The Most Ever Company on YouTube. It's about halfway through the novel, but they do a really good job. Yeah, it's pretty intense work for sure. But if you are interested in the more strange, because it's definitely a strange novel, side of things, it's definitely worth considering.
Gretchen:
I've only read some of the stories in "Dubliners" so far when it comes to Joyce. I haven't read "Ulysses" yet or "Finnegan's Wake". I definitely would like to give them a try at some point, especially because I love Beckett, who was obviously very influenced by Joyce and worked under Joyce.
Nate:
Yeah, certainly Ulysses, I think, is very, very doable. As far as comparison goes to works on the podcast, I think "Aniara" and Jarry are about as on par with most of Ulysses' difficulty, with a good chunk of Ulysses being less difficult than those works, and only a handful of chapters, maybe like two or three being more difficult than "Aniara". That's the kind of thing where you listen to the audiobook version, and a lot of that difficulty does melt away. You read some of the commentary that says, in this chapter, Joyce is doing this, and a lot of that difficulty melts away when you have kind of a framework to attach stuff to. Yeah, "Ulysses" is definitely way more doable than "Finnegan's Wake", which is far, far more difficult than "Ulysses" the entire time. It makes it a little bit daunting and intimidating, but again, the talent that he has for language and just getting these deep laughs out of you, I think makes it worthwhile. And it's probably the reason why a lot of people just spend a lot of time pulling this stuff apart.
So yeah, that's what I've been reading recently. It's been an interesting time, and we have an interesting set of stories coming up this month.
JM:
Yeah, between us all, I think we've had a pretty successful month or two of reading there, so that's awesome. Yeah, I've been ready to talk about the family.
Okay, so let's do it. I'm going to start with, I guess, discussing in a very general way where the family was in the 20th century, which is the basis of the works that we're covering today, and where it might be heading in the future in terms of social and technological development, which is kind of interesting. So good place to start, as any, is with the 1940s and the term nuclear family, which I always thought was kind of ominous sounding, because I thought, oh, nuclear family, so we're all supposed to go into a bomb shelter when the bomb drops, right? And we're going to have our family.
Nate:
Or it sounds like a Troma movie where it's going to be a bunch of mutated little monsters. We might have a case of later tonight, or two.
JM:
Yeah, definitely. But the term was actually coined by the sociologist, George Murdock, sorry, he was an anthropologist in the year 1949, and, of course, he's using the term as it relates to biology, and the idea, of course, is a married man and woman representing two halves of the nucleus of the family, as in the animal cell structure with the biological children spread around them. And this was considered by many, though not necessarily Murdock himself, as the ideal form of healthy family system and encouraged and fostered by societies all over the world at that time.
And, of course, it was especially popular in North America in the 1950s with the so-called Leave It To Beaver family and such. Much of this popularity and perceived thriving was in part due to social incentive. In reality, the fact that the situation had more primacy then doesn't mean that everyone was happier in those days' situations. And, in fact, you could argue that the nuclear family was in some ways bolstered by a certain amount of oppression, especially for women. A woman wasn't expected to be financially independent, and those that were depicted in the media as a threat to important moral and religious institutions and the family.
And, of course, the children of this era were also, in some part, the revolutionaries of the 60s and beyond, and they, in part, rejected many of these old institutions slowly but certainly. Meanwhile, in 1960, the birth control pill was approved in the United States. It had already been used extensively in many other countries before then, and that obviously made a huge difference to the way women, in particular, perceived sexual relations. Get on the pill, pursue education, and still enjoy intimacy with others. Why not? And, of course, men could also take steps.
So, biotechnological innovations took quite a few different forms, and it's naturally all about taking control of one's own body and the environment. And we're still evolving. Now, as of 2020, the traditional nuclear family may represent less than half the family units in the United States, in particular. Possibly as much as 40% of children are born to single mothers by way of various often-purposeful arrangements. And, of course, there are same-sex couples involved in this ship as well.
Today, we use sperm donors, egg donors, and gestational carriers. We've really been hammered on this for a really long time as a society, though, this whole conventional way to raise families. And, I don't know, speaking for myself, I saw it all the time in the media, on TV, in books, even, you know, as late as 10 years ago at my old work, where I used to get all kinds of popular mainstream books. But the fact that the alternatives loom large in the public space now, even though they may have been small to start with, and they seem to have taken on a lot more significance, and I think that really proves something.
We also have to consider that the nuclear family isn't an internal concept, dating back to all history and antiquity and stuff like that. Just as a brief anecdote, I remember studying Plato's "Republic" in high school and having to have a debate about it. And one side had to argue for things like the communal raising of children. In other words, not the parents specifically, and most everyone in the class seemed to think this was a really horrible idea. But nowadays we have polyamorous communities that also raise children, and this is a growing phenomenon.
And yeah, there's several reasons for the drop in commonality of the nuclear family. Many of them seem positive, maybe not all of them. Economic hardship has its role to play, and increased education and responsibilities, especially among women, mean children come much later in life, and are also more likely to be produced through alternative means. Not as much getting married at 16 and basically being turned into a baby-making factory, and surely that's a good thing.
There are certainly plenty of questions to be asked about families and where they're going, especially with regard to child rearing. Rachel Lehmann in her book, "Reconceptions, Modern Relationships and Reproductive Science", asks, which values of the nuclear family do we want to keep, and which do we want to evolve? And she speaks enthusiastically about the new social and technological developments that facilitate collaborative care, citing a more communal tendency among especially Latino and Black communities of raising children in a collaborative environment, and how this could be a model for many others going forward.
At the same time, she and some other proponents are cognizant of a potential dark side to especially the technological sides of this equation. For example, we have profiteering sperm banks, and the expense of egg transplants, and the possible corporate incentives to wait as long as possible before childbirth. And also, of course, the potential slide toward classic eugenics that some of this stuff presents, i.e., the choosing of specific donors based on perceived health criteria and genetic traits.
It's also a fact that particularly in the early days of sperm donation, the sperm banks didn't keep track of donor children at all, and nobody seemed to think of the possibility that one day there might be a couple of the same genetic material that would want to have children and not realize where this part of their biology came from. Particularly active sperm donors can sometimes be used to fertilize hundreds of eggs from a single sperm bank, and they sign a waiver that gives up their rights to know anything about what eggs their sperm goes to, and some clinics will pump women egg donors, especially with potentially risky hormones to try and stimulate egg production.
Worth noting that in many countries too, anonymous sperm donation is now illegal. Certainly some issues yet to be worked out here, with ethics and so on. So, what are some of the newest developments?
Well, an area of weakness in egg genetics material can be the mitochondrial DNA, and this can be prone to various genetic diseases, even though the mitochondria is only a small part of the total DNA matrix. So, the mitochondria is responsible for energy distribution within cells, and transplanting mitochondrial DNA from one egg to another might allow older women to give birth or preclude certain genetically transmittable diseases.
Another technology is so-called artificial wombs, basically an advanced form of incubator that might allow fetuses to survive outside of the natural womb from a very early point, like two or three weeks, for example.
Nobody's achieved complete ectogenesis, which would be a fetus born and gestated completely outside of the womb, but it's probably coming, at least practically. Some of this technology is still quite new and kind of on the ethical fringes of science. And yeah, there's a lot of questions that I have about this, and that certainly make a lot of this a pretty thorny issue.
Nate:
Certainly when big profit comes into it, rather than the ethics of what you're actually doing, it definitely raises a lot of issues. I've definitely heard a lot of stories of fly-by-night sperm donation places, not screening their donors, so it'll turn out that they have a donor with schizophrenia or severe mental problems that has now fertilized 50 or so eggs or something like that. There's been a couple cases like that that have made the news.
JM:
But then, if you have natural births too, you should let people with mental conditions reproduce if they want to. It's a very complicated topic, I think. And yeah, some really significant work is going on right now, especially around the University of Eindhoven in the Netherlands, around the artificial wombs, and using robotics and simulation rather than animal testing to achieve very human-like results. There's a lot of challenges, including gas exchange and getting enough oxygen to a newly developing fetus through artificial means. There simply isn't a sufficiently sized catheter, and artificial placenta is probably the next step. There's also interesting possibilities in the realm of actual cell modifications to make them into other types of human cells, and experiments have been done on mice, for example, to take tail cells and transform them into egg cells. Don't ask me how this is done, but it sounds pretty wild.
And imagine being able to create egg cells from entirely male specimens, thus bypassing the need of egg donors altogether, or a single woman could initiate the birth process herself. Obviously, yeah, we're a long way from producing this effect in humans. No one's yet created an artificial human egg, although apparently there have been successful experiments to transform human skin cells into sperm cells. But yeah, the possibilities are pretty staggering.
But perhaps the most important ethical question around such technology in the future remains, who will get to use it? So there's already a great disparity between countries, and not only countries, but between classes within the same nations, about who gets the best medical care. And it's possible that some of the people who need this kind of technology most will be the ones least able to access it in the current social climate.
So that's basically where we're at now. And next, I think, what we're going to do is actually take a trip way, way back to very early days, I guess. Well, I mean, not really, we've seen some of this kind of stuff talked about in science fiction already, but we're basically looking at the early 30s now, and our first story, which is, "Unto Us, A Child Is Born", by David Henry Keller, MD.
(music: layered voices)
David H. Keller, MD background, non-spoiler discussion
JM:
So David Henry Keller was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1880. A lot of this info comes from Sam Moskowitz again, so we have him to thank for talking to Keller and basically getting a scoop on him in his life. But apparently David was non-verbal as a young person, supposedly only able to communicate with his older sister, who died when he was seven years old. David was sent home from early primary school and declared language deficient. According to David, his mother gave the older daughter preferential treatment, but eventually realized she had to push her son harder to become verbal.
Finally, at age 10, he was able to re-enter the school system. He maintains that he had to learn English, "the way a foreigner would", but by the end it gave him an appreciation for the language and short, simple sentences. So from my view, it could be the relationship between mother and son colors some of his attitudes towards women in his fiction. He said that his mother was very proud and domineering, did not care for him over much, and that her determination to get him to succeed in English acquisition had more to do with a desire that he'd not disgrace the family than in genuine desire to impart useful and potent knowledge out of love.
Even his supporters' note that his fear of what we would now proudly and happily call strong women is evident in a great deal of his work. Although this was sometimes tempered by a feeling of compassion, it seems to have been afflicted by the need to show how women in their attempts to overcome perceived inferiorities brought tragedy into the lives of men.
Keller went to medical school at the University of Pennsylvania, and there he had some of his fiction pieces published in the college newspapers, and also, perhaps tellingly, the Presbyterian Journal. He and several university friends started their own magazine inspired by the popular pulp The Black Cat magazine, and called it The White Owl. He said working on this magazine was a formative experience, and unlike some other somewhat established authors, he would never refuse a request for a piece from a fan magazine that wouldn't be able to pay him.
In writing fiction, he often used the pseudonym Henry Cecil, one he started in the college paper days, and which he continued to use for decades, including many volumes of stuff he did not publish at the time. I think some of it is published now, but yeah. Many of this stuff was non-genre related, so there's a man of many interests, and not all his fiction falls into the science fiction category, but this seems to be where most of his fiction bread and butter was, so to speak.
He worked as a young rural doctor, and this was apparently a huge struggle for him. He finally got interested in the burgeoning psychiatric science, studying and finally accepting a position at a hospital in Illinois. He was an early psychiatric practitioner and stayed in the field until retiring in 1945. He worked in several different hospitals throughout the U.S. during that time, specializing in the treatment of the insane and also shell-shocked victims after the First World War. He actually served in both World Wars and attained the rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
While doing his main career as the MD, writing was fairly prolific for him, and much of what he wrote wasn't published, like I said, in his lifetime, but he didn't seem to show much interest in sharing a lot of this work with the general public, and much of it concerned his experiences, and they include several novels.
His first piece for Amazing, and probably science fiction as a whole, was "The Revolt of the Pedestrians" in the February 1928 issue of Amazing, and I'll just say right off that the story that we're reading today is not the first piece I've read by David Keller. I've read a few of his things, including a couple of the non-science fiction kind of more psychological horror stories, and in general, while I think that he does definitely have his faults, I can't help but kind of enjoy where he's going with some of this stuff and feel that he's at least a little bit ahead of his time in trying to really, I guess, get to the heart of psychological matters and trauma and other things that, certainly, especially for a magazine like Amazing in 1928, not many of the authors were willing to touch.
Supposedly, he did get the attention of Harper's Magazine with "The Burning Heart", but they wanted him to explain the story more clearly, which he, in a lofty attitude, refused to do. But, getting back to "Revolt of the Pedestrians", it's kind of an interesting example of his kind of socially motivated science fiction. It depicts a future highly polluted where everybody gets around by automobiles and that's pretty much the only way to get around, and people who are walkers are treated with contempt and hatred by the automobile riders, and it's got to the point where people have actually fused with their cars and they no longer have limbs they can use to get around, so some pedestrians decide to revolt and they shut up the power in New York and all the automobiles are disabled, and yeah, it's a pretty horrible death for all kinds of people, and he describes it very gruesomely. I don't know, it's kind of funny because, like, it was written in 1928 and I think most of the attitudes during that time were a lot more optimistic, but Keller was not an optimistic person, generally, about the future, which, again, makes him kind of unusual in the Amazing staple.
So, he did pretty well in the pages of Amazing, though, as well as Science Wonder Stories and Weird Tales, and he was well liked in this field and had a surprising amount of freedom to do what he wanted, including fantasy and psychological horror in otherwise science-fiction magazines. Interestingly, it's in Amazing that much of his stuff seems to have appeared, and because he was focusing on the human element in his stories more so than the technological one, and he was already 47 when he published his first tale in the magazine. Gernsback and later T. O'Conor Sloane really respected him, and his stuff was automatically accepted. Gernsback even had him be the editor of his Sexology magazine. I remember Charles Hornig commenting on, in the "Pioneers of Wonder" book, that his manuscripts were rather sloppy in terms of spelling and grammar and how much correction had to be made. Pretty typical for an MD, I guess.
But yeah, he was friends with Farnsworth Wright, the editor of Weird Tales as well, who often turned to him for advice in relation to his health issues and worries about whether they could be passed on to his offspring. Keller was maybe the first of the Amazing crew to have a book of his fiction published in French, and apparently, like his fellow, A. E. Van Vogt, and even the venerable Poe, he was well received in French courts.
So, as well as a considerable body of fiction, Keller wrote over 700 scientific articles both for academic journals and popular science publications. So, this guy was kind of a big deal in his way, and he was also interested in genealogy and published a lot of stuff connected with his ancestors in France and Cornwall, who had lived in Pennsylvania for a couple of hundred years. Going to Sam Moskowitz, who's made yet another extensive study of the man and his work and edited his collection, "Life Everlasting", maybe his important work is the novel The Devil and the Doctor, published by Simon and Schuster in 1939. In this work, the Devil and God are depicted in an allegory as two rival brothers, and The Devil is responsible for most human progress up to this point, while God brings about pain and misery and mankind, and it has hidden in this with a brutal program of propaganda and cover-ups. The book was somewhat reviewed at the time, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, a little controversial, and it seems many copies were remainder by the publisher or sold at very low prices.
He had a stint at Harvard during World War II instructing Army chaplains, which is kind of funny considering that book, but...
In other years, Keller was often invited to speak at science fiction events, where he was apparently considered witty, kind, and was a popular guest of honor, who gave many lengthy and entertaining addresses. In an interview in the Science Fiction Digest in 1933, Keller wrote of death, "I look forward to death as the great adventure. If after death comes nothingness, what a wonderful rest it will be, for I have been tired for many years, and if there is another life, I will go further, see more, spend less than I have on any trip so far. The first thing I will do is to hunt up a good library. I'm afraid that the heavenly one is rather well censored, and I may have to go to the asbestos library of Gehenna to get the books I want to read. Then I'm going to start writing. My idea of heaven is to have every story accepted by an appreciative editor."
That's pretty cute. I like it.
So the story we're covering today is a tale called "Unto Us a Child is Born", and this was published in the July 1933 issue of Amazing Stories. So Keller begins the story with a commentary forward explaining the inspiration of the tale, which is pretty unusual in itself. And this relates to a 1930 book of speculative predictive nature that caused some controversy at the time. And this is a book called "The World of 2030 AD", published by F.E. Smith, who was the first Earl of Birkenhead in 1930. And this is one of these prognosticating books about the future and developments all across the board.
Nate:
It'd be kind of interesting to read now because we're not too far away from 2030. So I wonder exactly what he says.
JM:
This book sounds pretty far out, actually. I didn't read it, but I was able to look at some commentaries about it. So the book supposes that agriculture will completely vanish from developed countries and giant factories will synthesize food using solar energy. Humankind will completely change the geography and climate of the Earth.
Nate:
Well, I guess we have done that.
Gretchen:
Yeah, not in the way he's thinking, I think.
JM:
Not so far.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
But he had an interesting view of first future warfare, too, believing that it would be more humane and enacted largely by essentially drones controlled telepathically.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
And nationalism will be completely obsolete and the British Empire will become a partnership of free and equal peoples. He supposed families would live largely in communal establishments with private bedrooms but sharing many other facilities. So before you get your hopes up thinking this guy is really progressive, he still believed that most domestic care was in the sphere of women and no amount of education would take this away from them. And in fact, his ideas about the role of women were definitely lacking in comparison to some of the others, believing that in order for the family to survive, there would have to be limitations placed on the intellectual development and education of women. So the book was disturbing.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. Still, I mean, I guess it is interesting that he envisions the future being like this more communal type society and he thinks that nationalism is going to go away when like not even 10 years later, World War II breaks out.
JM:
Yeah.
Nate:
But I think that definitely ties into the themes of this story as this story seems very much a reaction against that kind of thinking and what was going on in the Soviet Union at the time with the state seizing control of entire industries and things like that like we were talking about last time. That definitely makes a lot more sense knowing what that was about in context of this story.
JM:
Right. Yeah. Very much so. There was something else very much as well, which was just published at the time that this story came out and I would be highly surprised if Keller didn't read it and that's "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley.
Nate:
Right. Right.
JM:
If this was published in 1932. So two years after Birkenhead's book and the year before this story was published. If there is one book from that time period that's a longer work that concerns fertility and the family and stuff that we should really cover on the podcast at some point. It's that one for sure. And it's a book that I've been thinking a lot about recently. Just watched a video essay on it not that long ago and it's also really interesting to compare with "1984", which my friend actually brought up in relation to "Children of Men". She wanted to know if I thought the two books were similar and I don't know. We'll save that for the end of the episode here. But yeah, it's kind of interesting the way all these things tie together.
Nate:
Yeah. There's no shortage, especially of those type of stories that start appearing around this time. "We" is the other major one that gets cited a lot, but and doing research, there's like a good half dozen or so that cover sci-fi themes and are explicit political commentaries on either Soviet authoritarianism or the rising Nazi authoritarianism. So certainly a lot of stuff in the atmosphere around this time as far as that goes.
JM:
Yeah, very much so. So the book was disturbing to not just Keller. Russell Kirk, leading Tory at a time up a pine that it was very strange that a Tory had even conceived of writing this book and apparently caused a lot of arguments back and forth in the newspaper at the time. But yeah, so Keller obviously read this and was pretty disturbed by it and decided to write this little piece as nowhere near as profound as "Brave New World". But it's very short and I did find it somewhat poignant. I think that I can't remember the person that wrote his Keller's article in the SFE Encyclopedia, but he kind of observed that a lot of Keller's stories start out very strong and they just can't really follow through in the narrative that they kind of collapse under their own weight by the end. I don't know. I did find the ending maybe not so strong, but the last couple of paragraphs of the story were very powerful, I thought, in their way. I do think that this story does a pretty good job of taking a very narrow view, I guess, and following it through to a conclusion. And I think it works pretty well, actually. Maybe not a masterpiece, but a cool little short story of its time that would have been maybe set apart among its peers in Amazing because, yeah, this is definitely very much a social commentary kind of story.
Nate:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I think the ending is perhaps a little anticlimactic, but in a way that I think is pretty suitable for what it's going for. I don't think that it's a negative, that it doesn't feel like it falls apart, in my opinion. I agree with you that the last paragraph, few paragraphs, are pretty strong.
Nate:
Yeah, it does lay it a little thick with the political commentary, I think, and maybe doesn't really make for the best approach overall. But it is extremely short, and it does have some neat, sciency stuff in this, like the food science replicator type stuff that we get. Electric refrigerators are only about 20 years old by the time that this was written. So extrapolating food science out to the future, I think it's just a neat area of speculation. Also, the idea of computerized matchmaking, the state by either machines or whatever matching people up with one another has a real-world parallel in the 1960s, which you can read more about in the Mar Hicks article "Computer Love: Replicating Social Order Through Early Computer Dating Systems", but it's kind of interesting that Keller is thinking about that same kind of idea roughly 30 years prior to people trying it out in real life.
But yeah, for the most part, it does seem like a very obvious commentary on the state industry taking control of literally every aspect of day-to-day life, like what was happening in the Soviet Union. Like we talked about it last time with here, the state controlling both science and marriage and how that would play out in a society as far as just the people living in it, how people's interpersonal relationships are with one another and how that overcontrol by the state would affect just basic day-to-day feelings and emotions with the people that we love and are around us.
JM:
Yeah. It's really interesting, too. You mentioned the dating thing. I'd just like to point out that back in the 80s and 90s and early 2000s, there were a lot of dating stuff based on profiles that you made yourself and that you kind of shop to others who might be interested, telephone dating services and early on on the internet, you had a few things that became really popular, like OKCupid and stuff like that.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
The landscape has changed a lot now and it's become a lot more mathematically based. It's kind of interesting because it's not state controlled at all, it's more corporate.
Nate:
Right. Yeah.
JM:
But it's basically like that now, it's all a bunch of toggles that you turn on and off and the more information you give, it's just you answering a bunch of questions, clicking yes or no and the more questions you answer in theory, the better match you'll be able to make. I don't know, I find it pretty depressing personally, but things went a different way and yet not so much.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah. It is interesting on just thinking about these issues from the 1933 perspective on, I guess, where he envisions society heading.
JM:
Yeah. He does have a lot of stuff like this, kind of taking a social situation and bringing it to what he thought would be the logical extreme and where it would end up and it was usually kind of negative, not very optimistic compared to a lot of his peers. It would have been better if he kept some of the sexism and racism out. Not so much in this story, but I mean he has this whole cycle of stories called the "Taine of San Francisco" stories and it's about some kind of troubleshooter guy, kind of a scientific detective, I guess, and I don't know what it is about these stories in particular. I went through the whole list, I haven't read any of these ones, but Bleiler talks about all of them in his extensive "Early Years" book and while some of them sound entertainingly weird and wild, it seems like a lot of the racial stuff really comes to the fore there and it's unfortunate that he wasn't able to see past some of that stuff and just tell good stories, but I don't know.
We don't really get any of that here, but there is a little bit of this, I guess, weird the way it talks about women being equal in theory, but it doesn't seem like the text really follows through with that either and maybe maybe because he doesn't think it's a good thing. I don't know.
Gretchen:
I think even with the way that the matches are made, there's the hint of eugenics and even though it's not related here explicitly with racism or anything like that, you still kind of can feel that, I think, and that's why in some way this reminds me of some of a few of the other stories we've read from Amazing that kind of tackled this theme.
JM:
Yeah. Alright, well, why don't we get into specifics of this little story then and we'll talk about what happens and what's good in it.
(music: whirring and spinning up)
plot summary and spoiler discussion
JM:
The future is a world ruled by statistics where everything is finely and minutely controlled. There are many conveniences for the modern household and it really reminds me of the vibe of "Brave New World" a lot, which, as I said, just come out, but in any case, Jacob Hubler is actually part of a longstanding Pennsylvania family, just like David Keller. And his position in society is good and he's a government scientist of some kind and actually, yes, he's a food scientist and he makes replicators or something. Complete domestic kitchen system all enclosed in one machine and he says that women can't resist it, especially. It must be a very sexy kitchen robot.
So anyway, society takes all inventions for its own benefit rather than giving them to the individual and Jacob has the ability to live to 150 if he wants and to marry and maybe eventually produce a child. Of course, the marriage would also be arranged and it's all very nice, formal, and unforceful and benevolent, at least in theory. So it's not a violent dystopia, but it's uncomfortable enough that we reading it and no doubt even more so in 1933, people reading it would have been, oh, this isn't good. But at this time, marriage permits aren't plentiful. So Jacob at age 60 is pleased to get one. But he glumly and bashfully talks to his assistant Ruth about marriage and how his hopes for appropriate or one he likes, wife are limited, but she's being rather positive and of course, they do end up getting together much to their mutual benefit.
So to show how beneficent society is, the first thing he's granted is a month's vacation, but he actually has to do all these examinations and tests now while he's on vacation. So it's like he's bashful about getting married rather than concerned about what the state will be doing with him at this point, which is to examine him in every way, correlate the results, change them into mathematical formulae to determine classification and define a woman of the same group. Again they're not forced to get married, it's only if they want to. Then again, he's getting the woman he works with and it's perfect. So at this point, he does ask the examiner, he says, "and the old emotion, love, does it not enter into it? You see I do not know, I'm only asking for information, but in one of the old books I have it speaks of men and women falling in love."
The scientist looks stern, "that is the way it used to be. That kind of love produced the feeble-minded, the epileptic, the dullard, and occasionally a genius. Under the modern method, the birth and maturity of an abnormal child is not possible. You want your child to be perfect, don't you?"
"Of course, what father would want anything else?"
"Then do not allow yourself to fall in love, as your forefathers did."
So, duly chastised, they go on, and they use a big old-style calculating computer to tabulate and print the results, which are then interpreted by an official of some kind, and the results are spectacular, rare indeed, a new type. They muse about it like he's not there, and then show it in his cart with a bunch of code marks on it, and it means the child will be a philosopher for once they need those right now. Cool. But wait, there's no matching women. Well, he's told to have fun and be patient, and they might be able to find something for him, and the guy even talks about possibly fudging the numbers, even though it's risky. But two weeks later, an extraordinary thing happens. A woman who had a license for 20 years but didn't get checked because she had already decided who she wanted to marry, and he didn't have a permit. It's Ruth. Okay, so, ever hear of her? They ask, as if they didn't know. And she's a four-star person, which is really remarkable, and almost completely unheard of.
So, I don't know, I thought this was kind of interesting. She already knew what she was after. She kind of went against the whole social principle thing, and she already knew what she wanted, and she, I guess, just had to be patient. But I think this is, again, Keller sort of playing on the fact that women have intuition about these things, and men don't. And I guess that's putting people into a box, kind of, in a way, I guess. So, I mean, I guess I would have been interested to see more of her perspective, but this is a really short story.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know, this whole part didn't really work for me, especially the power dynamic between the boss and the secretary and all that. It's, I don't know, not one of the strongest points, I don't think.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, she's called his assistant, and it's kind of implied that she's his equal, but that's not really born out that much in those stories. So things proceed calmly and expertly for the happy couple, and there's a child born in a government hospital and given to the state for care. So that means nothing but machine care, which is thought to be better than especially having a mother. And reports are set monthly about how the child is doing, so that's all right.
More of the educational process is described, and again, it's all automated and highly specialized based on the career that's already been chosen and planned for the child. So at eight, he gets to receive instruction from the few remaining philosophers. That's, I don't know, that's something they asked for, but it's their job now, so they have to teach an eight-year-old, because it must be a great time to be a philosopher.
At 12, he's assigned a name, and the parents are able to do this. Of course, they choose Jacob Hubler Jr. to continue the long line of Jacobs that goes back to 1840. And right away, he's made assistant head professor of philosophy. Like everyone else, he's expected to work an hour a day, five days a week. So the Hubler move into a new, larger apartment, with the expectation that their son will, if not live with them, at least want to sleep over sometimes. Despite now knowing how everything should go in this society, both parents feel an immense prison of excitement. Because they've been loving this boy from a distance all this time, and now he's finally coming home. And so he does.
But it doesn't go that well. He has no connection with them at all, and the talk is awkward and inconsequential. And after a few minutes, the boy excuses himself, saying he must catch the next flight to China to confer with an old philosopher before he dies. And mother is overcome and asks, won't he stay the night? His room is all made up. But of course, the youngster defers. And dad makes empty talk about Jacob being a fine boy. The mother feels the chill of winter in the air and is obviously upset.
Once Ruth has gone, Jacob Sr. pulls out a report he just received from the state on his son's status and progress. And since the institution is pleased with him and how everything is gone, the couple can have another child if they want. But because it's really good, and maybe, I don't know, the most emotionally poignant part of the story, I'm going to read the end of it.
Goes like this.
"Still holding the letter in his hand, he went over to the central table and opened the baby book. He looked at the first few pictures, and then could not see very well because of the film over his eyes. Closing the book, he went over to the wall wireless and tapped out a letter in reply addressed to the child permit department. One sentence was the answer. One sentence and the name. And the message read, We will not have any more children, Jacob Hubler. He walked as quietly as he could to his wife's bedroom door. Her room was dark, and he could hear her sobbing in the darkness. He went in and touched her hair. Wanting to comfort her, he did not know what to say. The world was no longer all before them."
And yeah, that's really sad. That's the most emotionally poignant part of the story for sure. I couldn't help but feel that, even though, yeah, I mean, the journey to get there was maybe not the best in parts, but it's easy to be a little bit cynical about maybe knowing that Keller was a slightly reactionary kind of person, but I don't know. I kind of liked it. I couldn't help but enjoy it. Maybe because it was so short as well.
The guy had some interesting stuff. I enjoyed a couple of the horror pieces. I think they're definitely more on the psychological side. There's also a book called "The Red Death", which was about a plague, like another apocalyptic plague kind of story. Starts out really strong. It's definitely an example of one that kind of loses steam towards the end of the book. But yeah, I don't know. It's pretty good still.
Keller is certainly not a name that comes up very often nowadays, and I guess you can kind of see why.
Nate:
Yeah. I don't know. He's been coming up a lot in our research in the last couple of months in very unexpected places. He got translated into Russian and appeared in one of those magazines in the 20s. He's got a couple of major collections of papers in various places, and he's definitely got his name out there in a lot of places, but I don't know, this one was fine. It's short enough where the shortcomings in plot and all that didn't really matter too much. It's decent enough social commentary and some of the imagery of the computers controlling every aspect of life is kind of neat, if not a little bit on the nose.
JM:
Yeah, it's on the nose for sure. But I just think not too many people were doing social commentary in Amazing in 1928.
Nate:
Yeah. Yeah.
JM:
And I think it's kind of interesting because there are certain science fiction critics who say things like, oh, social commentary didn't really come into the genre, so at least in the magazines so the 1960s, and I really don't think that's true. I mean, maybe it's not awesome social commentary, maybe it's not the politics that they would like it to have, but it was certainly around before then and Keller was really into that and maybe one of the first in the American pulp side of things who was. So I think that's significant.
Nate:
Yeah. And I think we've seen a fair amount of that in both the Amazing and Astounding episodes we did. There's a fair amount of it there as well as the silly adventure stories.
JM:
Yeah. I mean, I think most of the Amazing was gosh, wow, scientists, science kind of stories. But even then, like, yeah, I mean, you've got some, but seldom as bald and as you say on the nose is this most.
Gretchen:
Yeah. Right. I mean, I think that there definitely is more subtle approaches that we've seen from the magazines when it comes to, you know, exploring social issues and political issues. This is my least favorite of the ones that we read for this episode, but I still do think it's interesting and I agree that it is interesting to see someone so blatantly approaching social issues during this time in science fiction. I don't regret reading this and I do think there's some interesting ideas here.
Nate:
Yeah. I would also put this at the bottom of the pile for the ones we read tonight. But yeah, it's interesting enough, you know, it's short again. So I mean, you can read it in 20 minutes and, you know, it's not really a huge drain on the time.
JM:
Yeah. I didn't really rate the stories because I think that, I don't know, I think that everything was so tied in with its time and place in this episode and everything had its purpose. I didn't really necessarily feel that one was so much stronger than the others or that, I don't know, it was different this episode, the feeling that I had, it was kind of cool because I kind of felt like we were seeing a snapshot of each decade almost, you know, we have the 30s, 40s, the 60s and the 90s and I think maybe "Little Imber" is not necessarily representative of its time and place like the other stories were. It's really cool though. But I think that a lot of it is kind of this interesting snapshot aspect that I found really cool about doing these and I think that all of the stories we're covering today are actually quite appropriate and well chosen. It's not my favorite. I think that actually the author I'm going to talk about next was to me the most interesting, but this was cool. I'm glad I read it. So I don't know. Like you said, it's short. We just pretty much explained everything that happened in it. So you know, you don't have to read it, but yeah, if you see David Keller's name, you might find the stories interesting. If you're kind of interested in this early, late 20s, early 30s, author kind of going a little bit outside of what would be expected of a contributor to Amazing, I think. And maybe that's why he was quite popular in his day.
Right, well, without further ado then, let's move on to the 1940s.
Bibliography:
Hicks, Mar - "Computer Love: Replicating Social Order Through Early Computer Dating Systems" (2016)
Lehmann-Haupt, Rachel - "Reconceptions: Modern Relationships, Reproductive Science, and the Unfolding Future of Family" (2023)
Moskowitz, Sam - introduction to "Life Everlasting and Other Tales of Science, Fantasy and Horror" (1947)
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